Notes from the Field

When thrown properly, a boomerang will always come back to the thrower. (When thrown improperly, it ends up over the neighbor’s fence where a dog chews on it, and you don’t get your boomerang back, but that is another story for another day.) This afternoon, Matt and I enjoyed what is known as a boomerang – after an hour and a half flight to Swiss Camp, we weren’t able to land, and so returned to Kangerlussuaq for the night. Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

The weather observations from Swiss Camp reported by Dr. Koni Steffen (who is already out at Swiss Camp, the lucky guy) revealed high winds all morning, up to 40 kts. Far too windy for the Twin Otter to safely land. Consequently, the Twin Otter went elsewhere to pick up cargo from another science group. Matt and I watched the weather carefully during the day, and tried to get some productive work done.

Around 2 p.m. local time, the report from Koni was that the winds had died down, and the weather was improving. After additional reports at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., the pilots decided it sounded good enough to fly north and check it out. Matt and I helped the cargo crew load the plane with our remaining bags, boxes, and pipes and head north to Swiss Camp.

It is a short flight, about 90 minutes. As we approached our destination, the cloud layers were low, and it was very difficult to make out any features on the surface (other than Koni’s tents!) or the horizon. Without being able to see either the surface or the horizon, the pilots can not safely land the plane. After a few passes, we turned around and headed back to Kangerlussuaq.

We’ve left the cargo in the plane with the hopes of making a second try tomorrow morning. The forecast at the moment calls for cloudy skies and snow, which is not so promising for us. Things look to improve significantly on Thursday, so we are optimistic we’ll rejoin Koni and the crew very soon!

So, dear reader, this might be our last post for a couple of days, but then again – you never know when you’ll boomerang again!

We have completed most of our preparations and are ready for our flight to Swiss Camp tomorrow. Today was spent tracking down our final cargo items and getting every to fit into boxes and bags – a trip to the cargo warehouse, a run to the airport to load a plane, back to the warehouse to move a bunch of big boxes, a walk back to the logistics building for a pre-field briefing, a walk into town for last minute groceries, a quick lunch of musk ox burgers, warehouse again, airport again, rinse, repeat.

A total of three flights made it out to Swiss Camp today, and the pilots worked hard to get it all done. The plane we fly in to Swiss Camp is a DeHavilland Twin Otter (DHC-6), which is a turboprop that is 52 feet long and can carry a few thousand pounds of cargo and personnel. The ones flown in Greenland are outfitted with skis over the wheels to land on the snow of the ice sheet. The cabin is 18 feet long and about 5 feet wide, and it is amazing to watch all that can be packed into that space.

On the last load of today, the first thing on the aircraft was a snowmobile, followed by two 55-gallon drums of fuel. It already seemed like the cabin must have been pretty full, but added to this were a couple of big tent bags, seven shipping cases, each nearly the size of a washing machine, and a handful of miscellaneous smaller items. Every time I was sure the cabin was packed the pilots would shift things around and then call for more. In the end, we ran out of stuff before the pilots gave up trying to pack it all in.

Tomorrow Tom and I will fly fairly light with a 10-foot-long plastic sled, a couple dozen pipes, a dozen 70-pound batteries, and our personal bags.

Once we are established in camp, we will begin our science work. This will consist of loading our pipes, batteries, cases, and GPS receivers onto a sled tied to the snowmobile, and driving 10-30 kilometers (5-20 miles) across the snow-covered ice sheet to various spots to install the stations. We have pre-selected locations surrounding the sites where boreholes will be drilled this summer using satellite images and datasets of ice thickness and the location of lakes that form on the ice sheet surface, but the final placement will also depend on things like time, weather, and ease of access.

After about 10 days of camping at Swiss Camp, our work will shift to its final phase, when we will fly by helicopter to the picturesque town of Ilulissat and visit our final site locations from there via helicopter.

Our communication from Swiss Camp will be limited, so, dear reader, we may have to fill you in on our exploits when we return. Stay tuned for the next installment, in which the pictures are likely to be much whiter and our clothing much puffier.

Matt and I have had a relatively uneventful day and are now situated in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. After our unscheduled stop in Goose Bay last night, we boarded a flight for Greenland late this morning. After the requisite passport check, we were free to get situated and start the next round of preparations for our field work.

Matt and I have relatively little cargo with us (about ~100 pounds each), because we shipped the majority of our cargo about a month ago. All together, we have about 3000 pounds of cargo that we sent ahead of us. Most of this weight is due to the batteries that power our GPS stations, and the pipes that hold the solar panels and GPS antennas above the snow surface. We’ll post pictures of the stations, as we put them up. We’ve got to get to our field camp first!

We will be based at a camp called Swiss Camp, so named as it was originally built by … the Swiss! The camp is now run by Dr. Koni Steffen of the University of Colorado Boulder. We will have a total of four flights in the next two days, moving our cargo, as well as Koni’s. Matt and I will stay in Kanger, loading the planes, while Koni’s group will go in on the first flight, and unload the planes as they come in. We’ve got our fingers crossed for good weather the next two days.

Your trusty correspondents in this blog are Matt Hoffman and myself, Tom Neumann. Matt is a post-doc working with me at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and came to NASA from Portland State University. Matt was here in Greenland last summer setting up the first four stations in our GPS network, and has been doing all of the hard work – designing the stations, ordering all the parts, figuring out where the stations should go. I am a research scientist here at NASA and did a similar GPS survey in 2006-07 with Dr. Ginny Catania, that was the precursor to our work this year. I’ve led or participated in 13 expeditions to cold places to date, and am looking forward to getting back on the ice sheet again.

Tom Neumann and I are en route to Greenland’s ice sheet for about two weeks of field work. Yesterday morning we flew from warm and sunny Maryland to Schenectady, New York, where we stocked up on food. This morning we got up at 4:30am in order to catch a ride on a LC-130 cargo plane with the Air National Guard flying out of Stratton Guard Base. It’s a lot like taking a commercial flight (check-in, security checkpoint, a lot of waiting), but without beverage service or proper seats! We were treated to a brief stopover in Goose Bay, Newfoundland where we could get some ice cream and refuel the aircraft. After refueling people and airplane, we discovered the airplane did not want to restart, so we have stayed for the night, while the crew works to fix the problem. So tonight, we are in Goose Bay, Labrador!

﻿After arriving in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland (fingers crossed for tomorrow!), it will be another couple days of sorting cargo before we continue on to our science camp on the ice sheet. Once in the field, our primary objective is to install eight GPS stations on the ice sheet to measure how fast the ice is flowing towards the ocean. (It’s a bit like a GPS receiver in a car, but in this part of Greenland the ice flows about a foot per day, so we require receivers with much higher accuracy!) In particular, we are curious about how the speed of the glacier changes throughout the year. Previous measurements have shown that parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet speedup a lot in summer when the snow and ice on the surface melt a lot. Meltwater that reaches the bottom of the glacier through vertical shafts called moulins will lubricate the bed, causing the ice to slip over the rock faster.

In the past, we have been able to detect this sliding in our measurements of ice speed at the surface, but figuring out exactly how this sliding works is tricky because it is happening a half mile below our feet! This summer we will return to Greenland to take part in a drilling campaign to drill through all that ice and send down sensors and cameras to observe conditions at the bottom of the ice sheet directly. The GPS stations we setup this month will give us a whole summer’s worth of speed measurements to compare against the borehole observations. The project is called Real-time Observations of the Greenland Under-ice Environment (or ROGUE, for those with a preference for acronyms). Tomorrow, we’ll send an update from Kangerlussuaq, Greenland with any luck!